


Quiet Dark, Frozen Dawn

by ArtemisTheHuntress



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: FOXHOUND, Gen, Slice of Life, hanging around on Shadow Moses with your dogs, pre-MGS1 but only barely, the dogs get higher billing than anyone else for a reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:34:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21937543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtemisTheHuntress/pseuds/ArtemisTheHuntress
Summary: For MGS Supply Drop prompt #48 - "Sniper Wolf and her dogs and their everyday routine on Shadow Moses Island."
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18
Collections: 2019 Xmas Supply Drop!





	Quiet Dark, Frozen Dawn

It’s a routine. First thing every morning, she feeds her dogs. They are most important; they come first. Diyar and Briska, steady reliable girls who are getting older now, sleep in her bed with their noses tucked into her armpits and in the hollow of her shoulder. They wake up when she does and only whine a little. They pad alongside her down to the caves that serve as the kennels here on the island where the rest of the dogs stay.

Up before the frozen, sluggish dawn -- this far north, this late into the winter, no one has the luxury of waiting for the sun -- and out into the early-morning night. It’s bracing. The dogs, with the wolf blood in their veins and shaggy wolf fur on their backs, don’t mind it, and she, with more metaphorical but no less fierce wolf blood in _her_ veins, has learned to embrace it.

The meat stays naturally frozen up on a specific rock shelf where the dogs can’t reach it. Sniper Wolf climbs up, bare hands against the frozen rock, numb by the time she makes her way down with half her weight in seal and caribou and fish slung across her back. The dogs crowd around her, sniffing, nuzzling, nipping, wagging their tails. They know the routine, know what’s coming.

“Good girls,” she murmurs in Kurdish, pushing eager and curious snouts away from the canvas sack. “Good girls, be patient girls, you never get it before it has heated up. You don’t even want it before it has been heated up. You know this.”

They continue to whine, but when she casts a glare over the pack and orders “Down!”, her voice curt and crisp in the still cold air -- _“Jêrê!”_ \-- and they respect her as their leader and they lie down.

They only take commands in Kurmanji. She tells Liquid, and Ocelot, and anyone who asks, that it’s a safeguard, it’s so they only take commands from her; Liquid has tried to test that (he doesn’t speak any of the Kurdish dialects but he does speak some Turkish, which he learned, to his disappointment and frustration, doesn’t work). It’s partially true, but she thinks only Raven guesses the rest of the truth -- it’s the only opportunity she has to use her language anymore. She doesn’t begrudge it, not really, but it’s nice to speak to her dogs in a language that feels like herself.

It’s not something that anybody needs to know.

The white cloud of her breath is one of the brightest things in this dimly lit cave. With some puffs of exertion, she hauls the bag of meat to a little hearth she set up in one corner, under an overhang half-open to the sky, on her first day here. It’s a circle of stones, a firepit inside, and a metal tub off to the left. Half of it is a stark black circle where all the snow has melted in a ring five feet across, all the moss and lichen and hardy cold-weather plant stems burned and blackened away by daily fires; half of it is powdery and white where snow has blown in over the course of the night. She cleans the snow off the charcoal and half-burned wood, puts some new logs on the fire from their storage niche under a clear plastic tarp, and then lights them up.

The meat is how her dogs greet the morning. The fire is how she does. The whole cave lights up in a glow that’s finally warm.

The metal tub goes over the fire, snow goes in the tub to melt and then meat in the warm water to stir and mash into a slurry. The smell of blood and fat and _food_ billows hot and tempting through the air so otherwise still; she can hear the dogs grumbling, snuffing, pawing at the ground.

“Be patient,” she says to the dogs, and they are, because they are hers. She isn’t afraid of them. Most everyone on the base is; Liquid claims not to be, but she sees him jump every time one of her dogs comes up to him. Ocelot claims not to be, even louder, but she also notices that he never goes near them at all. All of the enlisted nobodies on the base know better than to go near her dogs; the dogs snarl at anyone they decide they don’t like, and they can get _very_ scary when they show their teeth. They have wolf blood, and that makes them unpredictable. Only one of the scientists on the Metal Gear project Liquid cared so much about was stupid enough to go up to them and try to pet them, but they didn’t tear him to shreds, so apparently they liked him. Wolf doesn’t particularly care. If she orders them to attack, they will; and if she orders them to lie down and be patient, they will. They trust her, and she trusts them.

“I shot that big seal yesterday,” she says as she stirs the chunks of frozen meat in the simmering water until they heat through into a fragrant mash. She uses the English word _seal_. She doesn’t know the Kurdish word. She never needed to until she came here. “You all feasted on it but it was so fat you get the rest of it today. Some of the caribou, too --” She doesn’t know the word for _caribou_ either, isn’t fully sure Kurmanji has one -- “but that’s getting old. It’s mostly bones and marrow now. The marrow is good for you and you like it, and I know you like gnawing on the bones, but I think I will have to go hunting for you again soon. Maybe I will hunt today, when the sun is up, if the boss doesn’t have any annoying instructions.” Some of the dogs snuffle; Gilyaz snorts, like she agrees that Liquid can be ridiculous. She’s a good girl, and smart.

When the meat is heated through but not yet cooked, Sniper Wolf upends the metal tub and the mash spills over the cold ground. She whistles, and the dogs as one rush in to gobble up their breakfast. Karîn, a big girl and greedy, shoulders through to the front and even nips at Naza’s flank to get her to move. Naza snaps back and Wolf has to shout, “Karîn! Êdî bes e!” disapprovingly. Karîn grumbles but stops. Wolf doesn’t really blame her, though. It smells delicious. Liquid complains that Wolf’s dogs eat more food than all the human soldiers on the base get, which isn’t true, and anyway if he wants more he can hunt it himself like she does; he also complains that Wolf’s dogs get _better_ food than any of the humans on base do, which is probably true, but, again, if he wants better, he can hunt it himself, like she does. He doesn’t have the patience to lie in wait for hours for the perfect shot, but it’s the way to get to eat caribou rather than pre-packaged, over-salted, and tasteless MREs. She pockets a strip of seal fat for herself.

She considers Liquid her friend, in his own way, but he complains about a lot of things. They have been here on this spit of rock in the frozen sea for two months now and he still whines about the cold whenever he has to go outside, to the point where she thinks he just likes whining, but because he is her boss and her friend, she ignores him. He’s the one who refuses to wear a shirt.

If she had to choose between her dogs and her boss, she would betray him in an instant for them. Liquid Snake knows it but as long as he lets her have her dogs and her time to herself, she is willing to be loyal.

The ultimate goal will be the same, in the end.

She rinses out the cooling metal tub with snow, then turns to head back up into the base. Naza and Diyar try to follow her. She rubs them behind the ears and coos soothing nonsense to them, but has to leave. They can’t come into the base with her. That’s the agreement.

Sniper Wolf makes her way up to the officers’ mess hall for her own breakfast.

It’s warm, which is something of a shock, and loud. It’s this way every morning, but after the cold, dark quiet of the dogs’ cave, walking into a warm room with flat yellow lighting and Liquid Snake complaining loudly about the food quality always feels like slipping into another world.

“... does it have to be so _tasteless?_ ” Liquid is saying. “Spices preserve just as well as salt does, so one would _think_ that _eventually_ whoever decides what rations to ship out to outposts like these could come up with something that tastes like _anything_ besides oats and salt --”

Octopus laughs. At least, Wolf thinks it’s Octopus -- his eyes are glittering green today, his hair is black, and however he’s done his makeup it’s contoured his face to be remarkably thin and sharp. “I thought your national food was beans on toast. What perspective do _you_ have to complain about bland food? _I’m_ the one suffering up here.”

Liquid waves a fork angrily in Octopus’s direction. “Do you know how long I spent in Afghanistan? Do you _know?_ They have _food_ there. I can’t go back after that, not to _this_.”

“It tastes fine to me,” Revolver Ocelot says, from the end of the table. “Your generation is remarkably ungrateful. In a proper military --”

“In Mother Russia you ate nothing but gruel for breakfast and you liked it, we _know_ ,” Liquid says.

“You think ketchup is spicy,” Octopus adds, and that gets a laugh from Liquid and Raven, and even Wolf, sitting down now with her breakfast of cold water, a protein bar, and something unidentifiable and gluey and gray. “You don’t get an opinion.”

Vulcan Raven nods to acknowledge her. “Good morning, sister Wolf.”

“Mm,” she responds with a nod back, and starts chewing on her seal blubber, which, Liquid is right, tastes significantly better than anything being served at this table. And this is the mess reserved _exclusively_ for FOXHOUND.

“How are the dogs doing?” Raven likes her dogs, and her dogs like Raven. He asks after them every morning. It’s sweet.

“Well-fed, but starting to get restless,” she says. “They need a chance to go run. Maybe go hunt.”

“I’m not turning all your dogs loose,” Liquid says.

“It could be a good training exercise for the pathetic green troops they dropped up here,” Psycho Mantis offers. “It might give them some real-world tactical experience. There’s nothing in their heads right now at all.” Mantis isn’t sitting or eating, just hovering a few feet away from the table and staring at the rest of them in something like disdain. Wolf isn’t sure she’s ever actually seen him eat. She used to be curious. She’s known them all long enough now to not bother being curious about anything any of them do. Raven eats enough for the both of them, anyway.

“I’m not siccing Wolf’s dogs on the troops for a joke,” Liquid says.

“A _training exercise_ ,” Octopus corrects. “It’s not a joke, it’s _tactical_.”

“But it would be funny,” Mantis says.

“Boss,” Ocelot breaks in, with his traditional tone of voice that is somehow both simpering and disapproving, “that would be a waste of time and energy, and a distraction from your _actual_ plan, and you know it.”

“Well,” Wolf says, “Unless we have any other pressing plans, which we never do, I am sure the dogs would love the exercise as well. A day or two out of our usual rotation...”

There’s a collective glance around the table and an awkward silence.

“I was just telling the team before you got here,” Liquid says. “We’re making our stand. I’m going to call it. It’s happening tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

She must have failed to sound properly enthused, because Liquid presses, “There’ll be plenty of time to let your dogs bother the kids _after_. When we _win_. When we finally get what we want. That’s why we’re here, that’s why we’ve been putting up with this blasted place.”

“The project is ready?”

“The nerds confirmed the results of all their final tests yesterday. The Metal Gear is operational and all it needs is someone ready to _use_ it.” Liquid’s eyes flash with pride, or rage, she’s not really sure if there’s a difference in him. “The Genome Soldiers are starting to deteriorate, the ArmsTech president is here for the final inspection, and we won’t get a better chance than this. It’s time to show the world what Big Boss left behind and why they shouldn’t have let him.”

He’s so confident. He really thinks he can win. Wolf nods, and lets him continue monologuing.

They’re going to make their stand tomorrow.

She’s going to miss her dogs. She hopes someone takes care of them, after.

**Author's Note:**

> I love writing about morally questionable women and dogs, bless you OP for your prompt.


End file.
